Allegiance Partners

Who We Are

Allegiance Partners was built to be small on purpose — a tight core of two partners and a bench of independent specialists, brought in only when their expertise is actually needed.

We don't have offices. We don't carry staff, overhead, or the layers of process that come with them — because none of that has ever been what actually protects or grows a family's wealth. What does is senior-level expertise, delivered directly, by people who have spent decades doing exactly this work at the highest levels and have no further interest in doing it inside a large institution.

That's the whole model. No junior analysts learning on your file, no committee — just the right person, at the right moment, doing work they've already done at scale for thirty years.

The Founders

Equal partners in the firm

John Alexander
Co-Founder & Principal
Before Allegiance Partners, John was CEO of Lloyds Private Bank Switzerland, where he ran operations spanning Gibraltar to Dubai — a mandate that put him inside the private banking practice of half a dozen jurisdictions, and as many regulatory regimes, at once. He describes himself, only half-jokingly, as "the Ibn Battuta of international private banking" — well-travelled enough to have seen how every version of the private bank actually works, and just as often, how it doesn't.
Harold Hyunho Lee
Co-Founder & Principal
Harold is John's equal partner in the firm. A CPA by training, he spent years at KPMG before moving into industry as CFO for two US multinationals operating across Asia and Australia, and later as CFO of H Mart and of Western Beef. He went on to lead the Southpole Family Office and Foundation in Fort Lee, NJ, as Head of Family Office and Chief Investment Officer, and is also a Certified Fraud Examiner. That combination — public accounting discipline, operating-company CFO experience, and single-family-office leadership — gives him deep relationships and expertise across the Korean-American ultra-high-net-worth community and cross-border planning between the US and Asia.

The Bench: Independent Professional Advisors

Every engagement gets exactly the expertise it calls for

Tim Malloy
Estate & Tax Planning Lab, Cleveland
Tim provides the estate and tax legal work behind our most technical engagements — the trust structures, the cross-border tax questions, the parts of the plan that have to hold up to real scrutiny.
Malcolm Dermit
International Wealth Protection, Zurich
Malcolm brings deep cross-border insurance and structuring expertise, particularly around Private Placement Life Insurance for US and international clients. It's a specialized corner of wealth planning that's far more established in Europe than in the US, and one Malcolm has spent his career inside.
James H. Yoo, CPA
Managing Partner, Sebit LLP · New York
James supports incorporation, bookkeeping, and tax preparation for our clients.
Osahon Okundaye
Corporate & Investment Banking Counsel
Osahon is an attorney specializing in corporate and investment banking law, and one of the professionals we refer clients to through the Navigator's Trusted Advisor Bench. He's independent, like the rest of the bench — and notably younger than the rest of us, which shows up in how we work together: on simpler matters we often subsidize his time, and on more complex work he charges his standard rate.

Research & Coordination

Keeping every engagement moving

Ja'Nae Dayes
Ja'Nae keeps every engagement moving — research, coordination, and the day-to-day work that makes sure nothing falls through the cracks between a two-partner firm and a bench of independent specialists spread across three continents.
Tageena Reserve
Tageena works alongside Ja'Nae on that same research and coordination effort — another set of hands making sure the details behind each engagement are tracked down and nothing slips between the firm and its bench of specialists.

How We Work

 

For most of our more straightforward, single-jurisdiction engagements, you're working directly with John and Ja'Nae, start to finish. For the more complex, multi-jurisdictional, multi-generational engagements, we bring in the full bench: the right specialist, for the right piece, at the right time.
We are, collectively, old enough to have made most of the mistakes already, expert enough that we don't need training wheels, and independent enough that we only take on work we actually find interesting. That combination is rare in this industry. We think it's also exactly what a family with real complexity actually needs.
Security & Technology
Allegiance Partners

The Security of Your Information When We Use Claude

A note for clients and referral partners on how AI-assisted drafting and analysis is handled at our firm.

Allegiance Partners uses Claude, an AI assistant built by Anthropic, to help us prepare scenario analyses, research, and planning materials more efficiently. Because that work often touches your confidential information, we want to be direct about exactly how it is handled — and what we are still responsible for.

  1. Your information is not used to train Claude

    Allegiance Partners uses Claude under Anthropic's commercial (business) terms, not a free consumer product. Under those terms, Anthropic is contractually prohibited from using anything we submit — including names, financial details, or planning scenarios — to train its models. This is a contractual commitment on Anthropic's part, not a setting that depends on how we configure the tool.

  2. Your information stays inside a controlled environment — we control what leaves it

    When we work with Claude, your information is processed in an isolated, access-controlled session and is not published, indexed, or made visible to anyone outside our firm as a result of that processing. Nothing leaves that session unless Allegiance Partners chooses to send it — the same as any other document on our computers.

    If you receive something we prepared with Claude's help, it reached you because we emailed it to you or placed it in a shared folder, not because Claude distributed it.

  3. Backed by independent security standards

    Anthropic's infrastructure is independently audited to SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 standards, and Anthropic supports customers' GDPR and CCPA compliance obligations. Allegiance Partners uses Claude's Team plan, which includes centralized firm administration and single sign-on.

    More advanced controls used by regulated enterprises — audit logging, custom data-retention policies, HIPAA-ready configurations — are part of Anthropic's Enterprise tier, which we are not currently on; we're happy to revisit that if a client's own compliance requirements call for it.

  4. Our obligations to you don't change

    Using Claude as a drafting and research tool does not change Allegiance Partners' fiduciary and confidentiality obligations to you. We remain fully responsible for how your information is used, stored, and shared — exactly as if the work had been done entirely by hand.

This summary reflects Anthropic's published commercial terms and security documentation as of September 2026 and is provided for general information only. It is not a warranty, and not a legal or compliance opinion — please consult your own counsel with any specific questions.
Questions about how we use Claude or how your information is handled? Contact John Alexander, Allegiance Partners — john@allegiance-partners.com .